by Carol Anshaw
“It’s just that when I was using the john I noticed ... I mean I couldn’t help notice that there was a lot of Victorias Secret sort of stuff hanging from the shower pole.”
If James were a snoop like Fern (or her mother, or Harold himself), he would have found a lot more.
“Oh, that. That’s a little complicated. I guess you could say, in that way, Harold is sort of his own girlfriend.”
James takes this in without pressing for more. One of the most excellent things about him is that he is able to let conversations roll to a comfortable stop on the side of the road. He gets the general idea.
When they are almost to her mother’s house, where Vaughn is scheduled to sleep over tonight, Fern notices Nora’s car parked at the end of the block. The engine is running, the window open with a light veil of smoke drifting out. James is driving slow enough that Fern catches more than a glimpse. She can see that her mother is deep into a call on a cell phone. A cell phone that Fern wasn’t aware Nora had. A cigarette, which she thought Nora didn’t smoke anymore.
Lipstick
NORA, in a moment emblematic of where she had arrived at twenty-one, stood waiting for an elevator, holding a paper sack from the bottom, her hand warming a little from the grilled cheese inside. She had a large vanilla shake in the other hand. So far, bringing the exact same lunch every day to her boss appeared to be the most important duty of this job, a job to nowhere. She had hoped by now to be a little further along toward somewhere.
The school part was a breeze. Taking a degree in literature was, for Nora, like a pie-eating contest at an old state fair—being rewarded for doing something purely fun anyway. For years, reading had been her refuge from the limelight in her parents’ house, from their disappointment at her refusal to join the fun. Then the books provided her with a graceful way out, a fond farewell for all of them. Nora slipping off to college, Lynette and Art and Harold making up for their lack of understanding with abundant goodwill, as though they were flicking straw boaters over their heads, canes tucked beneath their elbows as they bid her goodbye.
Not that she had gone all that far away. She had great grades coming out of high school; she could have gone to college anywhere. Yet she had traveled only as far as Manhattan. Forty minutes by train from the house in White Plains. A short cab ride from her father’s office on Forty-seventh Street. It was as though she didn’t want to look back but wanted to be able to reach around and still feel them there. After a childhood spent setting herself apart from her family, she seemed to be entering adulthood already nostalgic for them.
At the same time, they appeared to be moving away from her faster than she was able to leave them. Lynette, now in her late forties, past her dancing days, had snagged a small but steady role in a TV series, Glenda’s Girls. She was Glenda, the head of an all-female detective agency. She had about five minutes in every episode—at the opening, when she gave the girls their assignment, and at the end, when she affectionately scolded them for risking their lives to get the job done. For this work, Lynette lived in L.A. for thirteen-week stretches, staying with Fern Lawler, who was now an abstract painter living on the wealth of past marriages (four), while Lynette was bringing home the largest paychecks of her long career. The two of them were accomplices in recapturing their youth and glamour. Lynette even had a fan club. There was a board game for the show with tiny dolls to represent the characters. Lynette had given Nora a Glenda doll.
Nora’s father still managed Vicki Ashford, who had a long-running gig in the lounge at the Tiara on Miami Beach. He also had a new discovery, a folk-rock duo called Hammer & Nails, and spent time on the road with them. He was going to bring Harold along with him next summer, teach him the business. Harold wasn’t really interested in the biz aspect of show biz. Nor did he care much for the road, or for rock. But he adored Miami and seemed to enjoy being around stages in general, and so was going along with the plan.
He had pretty much given up on high school. He didn’t like that they chose what he had to study. He found it oppressive. There had been meetings—Art and Lynette and the school psychologist. When Nora’s parents were out of town and she called Harold at the house, there was no answer. Then, on some impulse Nora couldn’t figure out, he would come to the city to stay the night with her, and seemed happy for her company, but he revealed little about what was really going on with him. If she asked direct questions, he would dodge and weave. He was “thinking about things,” or was certain that “everything was going to work out.” He was beautiful and confused and totally unable to talk about whatever it was he was sorting through.
Neither of them mentioned it when he used her make-up. Once, Nora got up before him and, coming through the living room on the way to meet Mr. Coffee, looked over at him lying tangled in a sheet on the sofa, and saw that his bony ass was snug inside a pair of flowered cotton Carter’s Spanky Pants.
She loved Harold ferociously but wasn’t up to dealing with everything there was to deal with about him. It was enough just trying to find her way into her own future, which in her more optimistic moments she envisioned rolling out like a rug before her—college, then graduate school, a thesis on the evolution of the novel of manners, an assistant professorship at a small college. In reality, though, she seemed to have already veered a bit off the carpet, or rather it kept getting tugged out from under her. This nowhere job, for instance, was the result of just such a tug.
Technically, it was not even a job; it was an internship for the spring semester of her junior year. She had been hoping for a spot at an old and famous literary journal, something that would have typed out as a nice, chunky line on her CV when she applied to grad school. Instead, she was only able to get something at a fashion magazine, which seemed enough of a comedown, but was actually a little worse in that Elan was not even a very good fashion magazine. Nora was assistant to the beauty and make-up editor, a thrillingly severe woman named Celeste, soon to be the recipient of the grilled cheese and shake.
Celeste was extremely thin; the rumor around the office was that she was addicted to laxatives. She consulted a tarot reader every month and ran her life by these readings. She seldom wore an outfit that wasn’t all black; in rare cases, for contrast, she added an earth tone. She had distinctive hair—long and coarse, wavy, and made up of several shades of brown and blond. Kind of Joan Baez with highlights. It was hair that had its good points and its bad days, as did her eyes, which were sometimes recessed in dark hollows. But even on the worst days Celeste was extremely attractive in a way Nora hadn’t encountered before. That is, she suspected the attraction existed in the space between them, that it ran both ways. She wasn’t sure what to do with this magnetic field, which didn’t seem to give her any particular power over Celeste, who mostly manifested her side of the attraction by averting her gaze from Nora whenever the job called for them to interact.
Today, when Nora brought her lunch in, Celeste looked out the window of the office and Nora followed her gaze. The window faced a warehouse that now held artists’ lofts. The loft directly across from Celeste’s office was usually brightly lit and sometimes occupied by a portly man who wore bright (yellow, Day-Glo orange) bikini shorts. It was always worth a look to see if he was there; at the moment, he wasn’t. Whenever they did see him, each of them claimed dibs on him. This was pretty much their only joke.
“I’m going to give you a chance to prove yourself,” Celeste said (to the window). As though they were in the brain surgery department of a teaching hospital. As though anything Nora could do here would prove anything. “I want you to do the fall lipstick roundup.” She said this with a totally straight face. Everything was straight-faced and dead earnest around the offices of Elan. They couldn’t afford to laugh at the ultimate purpose of all their enterprise and long days and pressing deadlines. If someone started laughing, it was all over.
“Roundup,” Nora said, nodding, trying to look as though she was accepting a challenge, had precisely the article in mind, underst
ood the concept and was ready to run with it. Celeste wasn’t fooled.
“You have to find a new angle, some way our readers can think about lipstick and how it can work for them, and how it has to be particular to them. Specific.”
“Like choosing shades based on your blood type?”
“We could all position ourselves ironically here,” Celeste said, and took her gaze and tucked it down amid the proof sheets scattered across her desk. “But ironic detachment doesn’t really work. It starts seeping into the pages of the magazine. Our readers are not ironic. They are young and desperate to be stylish and attractive. Because of this, they need to know what’s happening with lipstick, and how it directly relates to them. They await our guidance.”
Nora didn’t know how to respond and so wound up standing silent across Celeste’s desk from her until Celeste said, “You’ll see. You step into this version of reality, and everything starts to fall into place.”
Throughout that same spring, Nora had also been dating Russell Koenig, from her poetry workshop at school. Her poems, she was pretty sure, were third-rate Sylvia Plath. Maybe fourth-rate. His were a combination of corny and sentimental and rugged. She attributed these qualities to his being from the Midwest, which she imagined as a place of good intentions and plainer emotions. Russell was also an English major, but with a commercial bent. He had been working part-time for the past couple of years at an ad agency. He hoped they would keep him on after graduation. Nora liked him. Also, she liked that he didn’t like her too much, that whatever he felt about her fell short of passion. There were training wheels on their romance. No one was going to fall off and get hurt.
On their dates, they went mostly to films at revival houses, and to author readings. So far they had been to hear Grace Paley and Joseph Heller, had seen Notorious and Double Indemnity. They had had dinner once at an Indian restaurant in a basement on Sixth Street, and twice at an Italian place in the Village. It was as though they were following some plan, ticking off events and accomplishments, acquiring merit badges.
They busied themselves filling in the blanks with a running sequence of questions, small revelations, fresh beats of one of the private jokes they now shared. She had already brought him out to meet her parents. (Lynette let Art “persuade” her to sing “Volare” while Harold accompanied on the piano. Nora was excruciatingly embarrassed in the moment. But over the weeks since, “Volare” had become a kind of code word between her and Russell for her family’s idiosyncrasies.)
She would meet Russell’s family at the end of the summer. He was going to take her home with him to Illinois, to Decatur. His father ran a hardware store there. Russell had three brothers, two sisters—some already with children of their own. They all gathered at their parents’ house for Labor Day, no matter what. His mother put out a ham. She had a small smokehouse and was locally famous for her bacon. Nora dreaded meeting her, being confronted with her pioneer spirit, and with all of Russell’s siblings, who apparently whiled away the long holiday afternoon with a rough and tumble lawn game—contact badminton. This was part of the tradition. Nora’s family had no traditions. When she thought of going into Russell’s tradition-happy family, she feared she wouldn’t be up to the task, weathering all the hale-and-heartiness. And she couldn’t imagine Russell shielding her from any of it. He was too congenial, and would expect congeniality from her as well.
They had waited to have sex until after the two movies and one of the readings. With Russell, it was a wordless, industrious affair, reminiscent of her afternoons on the basement couch with Teddy Frey, and satisfying in the same down-to-business way.
Now, on Saturday nights, they stayed in. They watched old movies on TV. He went downstairs and brought back carryout. He had a studio in Chinatown, above one restaurant and across the street from another. There was always a heavy current on the air that drifted up and through his windows, a Morse code of oil and meat, pepper, fish. Nora was hungry within minutes of arriving.
Sundays, they got up early and went running together. She enjoyed the weight of him beside her in the universe, the soles of their sneakers hitting the asphalt path in syncopation. She wanted a boyfriend, wanted that slot filled, and now it was. Now she didn’t have to worry about not having one.
“How’s the roundup going?” Celeste asked one morning, a few days after she had given Nora the assignment.
“I have a concept.”
“A concept is a start.”
“‘Read My Lips—What Your Lipstick Says about You.’”
Celeste looked up from a layout. For once, she actually looked directly at Nora. The look had absolutely nothing to do with business, even as she said, “Liner. No matter what those lips are saying, they have to be lined. Our three largest cosmetics advertisers want us to feature lip liner.”
Nora stood, listening and not really listening, noticing that as Celeste was casually looking at her, she was also assessing, taking a reading. It was a look that was both saying something and asking something else. Nora went a little wobbly.
A couple of weeks later, artwork for the lipstick roundup had come in late, by messenger. A lot of the shots—a few too many in Nora’s opinion, but no one was asking her—dealt with how to use a brush to outline the lips before filling them in with the color that would most succinctly telegraph the wearer’s personality.
“This peach looks a little weird,” Nora said when she and Celeste had the slides laid out on the light box.
“Maybe,” Celeste said. “Let’s get a better look.” She went over to flip off the overhead fluorescents. The light coming up through the slides was the only light in the room. In this moment, Nora learned something about how it was with women, how it could happen in a brief series of seconds. The way time elided, transformed from something tocking between marks on a dockface into pure liquid, something to slide along on. How long did they stand there, hands flat on the translucent glass, almost touching, both of them listening, like pulmonary specialists, to each other’s breathing—an hour? half a minute?
Beyond that, how long before one of them made a defining move? How long did they stay in Celeste’s office, first on the sofa, then on the industrially carpeted floor? The fat man came home, watched TV in his briefs (electric blue), went to bed.
“I hope you understand, tonight changes nothing,” Celeste said much later, when they had both signed out in the lobby in the middle of the night.
Nora wanted to believe her. She wanted to believe nothing had changed. Celeste didn’t know that she had just brought Nora out, and Nora didn’t want to give her that piece of information. Neither did she want to make a big deal of what had happened. After all, this was Manhattan, and it was the seventies—way into the sexual revolution. Tonight was not about being gay. She didn’t want it to be about that. That looked way too hard—the social stigma thing, but more the boundlessness. Stevie, her closest friend at school, was a lesbian, and Nora didn’t want to be that wide open, that tragically earnest, that annihilated by desire. The music Stevie listened to was also earnest, and ghastly—campfire songs only about women loving women, sisters leaning on sisters, instead of about cowboys on the range.
Nora didn’t want to care as much as Stevie did, to bleed that way. But this was precisely what happened with Celeste through the rest of the spring and into the summer when her internship ended and Celeste hired her on as a part-time assistant. This arrangement gave them a couple more months through which they took afternoons out of the office—ostensibly to visit model agencies or scout locations for shoots. In reality, they headed straight for Nora’s apartment, where they pulled the shades and slipped out of their clothes within moments of arriving, like firemen in reverse.
Like the job, the romance led nowhere. Celeste lived with a famous TV journalist. She was not going to put that relationship at risk, she had been candid about this from the start. And even if Celeste were available, she was not someone Nora could imagine as a partner. Celeste thought fashion had real impo
rtance. She talked seriously about accessories. She was vain and shallow, ruthless. Her highest aspiration was to be promoted to senior fashion editor for the magazine, a bigger stupid job. She would cut a deal with the devil to get the current occupant of the position to drop into a manhole.
But in these long, hourless afternoons in bed together, fashion was rendered temporarily irrelevant. In this context (which was really a retreat from context), Nora found she had the power to soften Celeste, to make her leave her datebook in her bag across the room, make her not call the office for messages, make her forget her next appointment, her famous girlfriend, and focus tightly on what she wanted from Nora, what Nora made her ask for, politely, made her say please.
Nora’s sexual experience was limited; she had never been naked with anyone the way she was with Celeste. And so she made the mistake of translating this nakedness into more. There were wide flat stretches of pillow talk and afterglow during which she opened herself in ways that seemed extremely foolish later, when Celeste backed off suddenly.
She had to let Nora go at the magazine, and was simultaneously no longer available outside the office.
“It’s just starting to be a very busy time for me” was how she put it. “I’m going to have to tighten my focus. It’s nothing personal.”
Nora was stunned. All she could do was stand there looking at Celeste’s perfectly made-up face and see clear through to her vacant soul, unable to make any use at all of the knowledge that Celeste was utterly worthless as an object of affection.
She went back to her apartment, reviewed the affair, and came to a rough understanding that this eventuality had been on its way all along. Nonetheless, she behaved badly for a while. A little petulant stalking, a scene on the sidewalk outside a bookstore. From there, she behaved better but felt just as bad. She never wanted to feel this bad again; at the same time, she suspected she had just wandered onto the edge of a vast landscape of pain.